


made of starstuff (want it to mean something)

by Sroloc_Elbisivni



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Character Study, Coming Out, Family, Gen, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Second person POV, Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, bigender pidge, genderfluid pidge, in space no one can hear you insist there are only two genders, references to cosmos, written pre-season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 17:43:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8499229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/pseuds/Sroloc_Elbisivni
Summary: The name you are born into is Robert Neil Holt and when you are five years old you go to your parents and tell them it doesn’t fit.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [ I have a lot of feelings about genderfluid pidge](http://sroloc--elbisivni.tumblr.com/post/147500943799/i-havent-seen-this-around-among-the-many)

The name you are born into is Robert Neil Holt and when you are five years old you go to your parents and tell them it doesn’t fit.

There was a person at kindergarten a month ago from an organization whose name you can’t remember and they read you an old story about a girl named Jazz who wasn’t born a girl and talked about how some girls are born looking like boys and some boys are born looking like girls and some people who aren’t either can be born looking like anything and some boys or girls or people can be born looking like something-in-between.

Aiden, who wears nail polish and once got in trouble for pulling down girls’ pants, went to see the nurse after that and came back looking like he was glowing.

Now Aiden has some days where Aiden’s a she and some days where Aiden’s still a he and you have been thinking very, very hard. And you have realized that your name does not fit.

You know that you like wearing the skirts in your closet and playing with Matt’s old robots better than his old dolls. You know that your name doesn’t fit. You know that none of it is going to mean anything unless you want it to.

You want it to.

* * *

 

You tell Matt, and he hugs you, and he takes you to tell Mom and Dad, and Mom hugs you while Dad tapes your picture to a pillow on the space station and hugs that to make you laugh. You think you can feel it, from 250 kilometers up and 7900 kilometers east.

Mom asks you what you want to be called, since Robert Neil doesn’t fit, and you don’t know. You think about it very hard, and you know you want it to be different from Robert and you think you want it to be a girl’s name, but you hadn’t thought that far ahead.

You tell Mom and Dad and Matt this and Matt grins.

“Poor planning, Pidge,” he tells you, because he won’t stop teasing you that time you were chased by a flock of pigeons when you were three that you don’t even _remember_. You’re on Mom’s lap and can’t hit him, so you just glare and Mom squeezes you like she knows what you’re thinking.

“What about Katie?” she suggests. “Katie was your great-grandmother’s name. It’s what we would have called you, if you had been born…looking like a girl.”

“A-F-A-B,” Dad tells you on the video, because Dad likes using science words for everything. “Assigned Female at Birth.”

You think about it, and try it out on your tongue. “Katie, Katie, Katie.” It doesn’t feel wrong like Robert did. It sounds like something you could call a robot, K-T. “Say it like you’re mad at me?” you ask Mom, because you know you’ll hear it like that a lot.

Mom laughs too hard to say anything. You decide Katie is fine.

* * *

The second name your parents give you is Katie Ada Holt. You understand the middle name when you’re seven and you realize, once again, that your father is a massive geek.

But Ada Lovelace was the _coolest_  so you’re totally keeping it.

Being a Katie is weird. You keep forgetting it’s your name. Other people keep forgetting it’s your name. But you keep introducing yourself with it and then you move to Arizona because Mom gets a job and it’s closer to the Galaxy Garrison and no one knows you used to be a Robert.

You’re not sure how you feel about that.

* * *

‘She’ fits awkwardly at first, but it gets easier and easier to hear until soon it’s only a couple of days when it feels off and you want to correct the person who keeps saying you’re a girl.

You don’t, though, even though it feels like you’re living a lie, because you think it might just be that you thought you were a boy until you were five and you still have a body that looks like a boy’s and you aren’t sure if the lie is that you aren’t a boy or you are one and some days ‘she’ does fit or at least doesn’t _not_  fit and

You don’t correct anyone. You get an implant for puberty blockers when you’re twelve.

Your doctor recommends waiting to start estrogen or any other hormones until you’re sixteen, and any cosmetic surgery until you’re at least eighteen.

You don’t tell Mom or Dad or Matt, but—you’re relieved to have more time to convince your head that ‘she’ _does_  fit. You know that there are some people who switch, but you’re scared that if you try, they’ll just think you’re changing your mind or that you were never really a girl in the first place.

Because the reason hormones and surgeries have to wait, according to the doctor, is “To make sure the body has time to finish growing, and because sometimes gender dysphoria goes away with age. It’s unfair to force you to make these decisions that could affect the next seventy years of your life right now.”

You don’t know how you feel about being a ‘he’ except that you don’t want to be one _all the time._  It would also be…almost easier, to go back to being a he. You don’t know yet, you don’t know anything except that being a she is working.

Most of the time.

* * *

You are thirteen when the Kerberos mission happens.

“Escort her off the premises!” Iverson bellows, and you have felt the pronoun grate against your skin before, but this time it feels like a deeper stab and you know exactly what you have to do.

* * *

You give yourself the name Pidge Gunderson a week before your fourteenth birthday.

Your should probably have chosen a more typical masculine first name, like your mother suggested when you first proposed the plan, but.

“You need to remember why you’re doing this?” she asks, quietly.

You open your mouth, and then close it, and nod because that’s easier than explaining you can’t commit that much without fear of losing yourself, and she hugs you again, before asking if you want to go to the doctor’s to get the implant topped off before you go to the Garrison.

You think about it, and then say yes.

Even if you don’t want it, after this, you still want all the time you can buy yourself.

* * *

You cut your hair off on your own and stare at the person in the mirror for a long, long time.

* * *

You expect that it will hurt to go back to being seen as a boy, all the time, but there are more important things to be concerned about. You’ll deal with it.

What you don’t expect is that some days it feels really, really right.

You told yourself that you weren’t going to think about it. You tell yourself to stay focused on your work, at squinting at the world through your glasses that never seem to stay clean.

But you still have to live in your body, and you still have to hear people talk about you, and you notice—there are days when it really does fit.

You don’t have time to deal with it. You can’t risk even saying it aloud, even if you had someone to say it to. There are ears everywhere.

As you are so vividly reminded when Lance and Hunk find you on a rooftop.

* * *

Space is epic. Space is awesome. Space is kind of terrifying.

Space is where your family is.

Space is also somewhere where literally no one knows who you once were.

You spend so much time existing either totally alone or tightly intertwined that you have to rely on yourself to figure out who you are.

Pidge as a name fits better than “Robert” or “Katie” ever did, and you cling to that even when the word “he” is bouncing off your heart like a rock hitting tin. Which is only some days, now, without the surety of the expectation of “she” to fall back on.

You can’t really tell anyone that you think part of the reason Voltron won’t form at first is because you know you woke up that day a girl, one of the few days of rock solid certainty and not just an in-between ambivalence where either label seemed to suit. You can’t explain that the constant press of the subconscious expectations that there would be a “he” in your place made you feel trapped and snarly and twitchy, made you faster to mouth off to Allura.

You’re just glad that the feeling passed sometime during the food fight, and you couldn’t even remember why you’d been so mad.

Shiro might know more of who you are, you think. You met him as Katie, once or twice. You didn’t expect him to have remembered you.

He does, and he calls you that, and it clicks into place like exactly what you’ve been missing for months.

You savor the feeling, and then pack it away tight.

It doesn’t matter if he knows. You’re leaving anyways.

The rest of the team not ever knowing—

You can’t decide how you feel about that. You categorize it as a fact you’ll have to live with and move on.

Or rather, you don’t.

And then the day comes, right before the castle flies, and you woke up with your body feeling a little bit off and the word “she” when you tried it aloud seemed to sing in your veins with rightness and suddenly this is going to be forever and _you want this to mean something._

“Hey, guys?”

* * *

It feels so good, so right, and in Voltron you can _feel_  them aware of you in all your aspects and the way your certainty is flowing and their certainty feeds yours until you collapse that night so, so glad you told them.

And then a week later you wake up and reach for that certainty and it’s gone and when Hunk slips up over the comms—

“So I go to Pidge, and he says—oh crud, sorry Pidge, she—“

“It’s fine.”

“No, I really—“

“Hunk, _it’s fine._ Either’s fine.” You’re struggling with a bit of code and furious with yourself in so many ways and can everyone just _move on already?_

Hunk switches between “she” and “he” for the next couple of days, and that. Almost works.

And then you all fall through a wormhole and everything’s a mess.

* * *

When all the paladins finally make it back to Voltron, Hunk has gone back to calling you “he” entirely.

You barely notice, and don’t see the point in correcting him because it’s fine most of the time anyways and _you finally found the prisoner records._

* * *

Forming Voltron to free Dad and Matt is terrifying and exhilarating and a really delicate balance between wanting to smash everything that could get in the way of your family and wanting desperately to be down there with them, and eventually you can feel the rest of the paladins all latching onto your emotions to fuel the formation because what the hell, why not all get in on it.

After the battle your lion is the first to break away and you land and hug them both so tightly that it feels like your arms are going to snap.

* * *

That night, you sleep outside their healing pods and wake up surrounded by a pile of the other paladins, their blankets, and too many pillows to count.

* * *

Matt and Dad are up and rambling around the ship and poking at things within a couple of days and you’re so happy you could just about burst.

There are new problems, though, not the least of which is that Hunk will sometimes call you “he” and Lance and Keith have picked up the habit as well and it might be nice if they weren’t somehow almost always doing it on the wrong days.

Matt notices too—not the wrong days, but that they’re doing it at all—and takes it upon himself to scold them.

Because apparently your luck has just gone to shit recently, you walk in on him telling them that “my sister deserves just as much respect as—“

And again. It might be heartwarming if it wasn’t on a completely wrong day for it because today is another certainty day and you haven’t bothered explaining to Matt or Dad because you just know that if you try they’ll think you were making it up the whole time or confused or not really a girl all the time and you know you aren’t right now but you might be someday and—

You forget what you yell at Matt. You forget how you got to this part of the Castle.

You just know that you feel like crap, so you curl into a ball and bury your face in your knees and sob because _why are you such a goddamned mess?_

You don’t even hear footsteps approaching before a weight settles down next to you and the sigh is familiar and you’re too tired to run away so you just burrow into Dad’s chest and cry some more and he strokes your head.

“Sweet pea,” he sighs into your hair, and just holds you for a bit.

“I don’t _know_ ,” you finally growl out, because you don’t, you don’t know _anything_  “I don’t know what I _am_ , Dad,” and you spill it all out, the days when things are right and the days when they aren’t and the days when you can’t even _tell_  and it doesn’t even _matter_  because _there are more important things to worry about_  and how you can’t even _ask_  because you can barely keep up, how is anyone else supposed to? And you don’t even know if it’s _right_  if you’re ever a boy or that’s just how you say you feel on the days when you’re comfortable in your skin because that’s how you’ve been taught this body is called and you don’t have any other words for it and _why can’t you just make up your goddamned mind, why are you such an IDIOT—_  

and Dad just holds on and lets you go until you’ve run out of words and are just repeating yourself, and then until you’ve run out of enough coherency to repeat yourself and are just sobbing without words.

And he holds on even longer, until you’ve run out of sobs too, and are just sort of shaking, until the shakes have died down to exhaustion, and then he helps you sit up and slings an arm over your shoulder.

“Does Katie not fit now?” he asks, and his tone isn’t light like a joke, it’s rough and gentle and trusting.

“It—no.” You’re leaking snot, but you just wipe it off on your sleeve. “I—Pidge does.”

“Okay, Pidge.”

“I’m keeping Ada, though,” you tell him.

“She was the first—“

“Modern computer programmer, I know.”

You both sit there in silence together for a while, and then he asks, “What fits best today?”

“He. I think.”

“Alright then, younger son.” He kisses the side of your head. “Let me know when it changes, promise?”

And that knocks all the breath out of you, that same easy confidence and pride in you that he had when you were five and telling him that your name didn’t fit, or seven and building robots, or nine and hacking his computer.

“How—how do you know I’m not—“ You aren’t sure how to finish the sentence.

“Do you know why your mother and I gave you your first middle name?”

“No.” Robert had been a family name, but Neil…

“You’re going to mock me again for this, but it was because of science too. For Neil Armstrong and Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

You know who those are, even if they both died ages ago. “You’re such a geek.”

“Oh, I am. Never been ashamed to admit that. But I always wanted to give you the name of men who cupped the universe in their palms and tried to understand. I wanted to let you know, even on the day you were born, that you could go out and do it too.

“When I was a kid, my favorite thing to watch were Tyson’s Cosmos specials, and he quoted Carl Sagan—‘We are all made of starstuff.’ That’s you.” The hand around her shoulder tapped a single finger. “Burning and glowing and changing starstuff.

“I may be an old scientist, but that just means I’m always ready to learn. And there’s certainly no one I’m going to trust better than the expert on a particular subject. You know who you are, Pidge. You knew who you are when you were five, you’ve known who you are every day since then. I just want to try to know, too.”

Later, you will apologize to Matt and explain to Matt and he will hug you very tightly and apologize right back. You will go and find the others, and explain to them too, and Allura and Coran will insist on telling you long past when you’ve stopped listening about all the genders of all the aliens Altea ever traded with or encountered or studied and you will let the ramble fade into background noise because you don’t need to know who they are or were or who anyone else is, just who you are.

Tomorrow you will be yourself, but your yourself might be different and it might be the same and it might start off one way or end up the other and you will live with it and wait for it to change and expect life to continue on as normal and then Hunk will tackle you with the green and white pins he made, babbling about how they catch right onto the fabric of your suit and you will stare at them and call yourself an idiot again for not having this idea yourself and for thinking that these—that your _family_  would never understand, because your family has _always_  understood and you just had to be the one to decide if there was something to understand.

And Hunk will tell you that you don’t have to use the pins and that they don’t have to mean anything, and you will decide again that you _want_  them to mean something and pin the white one you have already decided means you are a she onto the green part of your chest where everyone can see it, and they will see it because you will tell them right away—

but right now, you just grab onto Dad and hug him very tightly and he hugs you right back, and you know that you were right, you did feel that hug from 250 kilometers up and 7900 kilometers away because you can feel it again now, nine years and billions of lightyears later.

You are almost fifteen years old and the name Pidge Ada Holt fits just right. 

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm genderfluid. And non-binary. And Pidge means quite a lot to me.  
> I wrote the post linked at the beginning a few months ago, and put down the idea for this fic as a kind of distant maybe-someday thing and moved on.  
> And then things happened and I had to get all of this out into the world and I threw out 3600 words of a self-projecting character study in four hours and then went to bed.  
> I wanted to explore not just Pidge's relationship with her family, but also what being a trans/nb kid would look like in a society set up to accept and welcome that where there had been efforts to move beyond traditional gender roles.  
> Personal headcanon for Episode 2 and Pidge's attitude is basically as stated above, because that's about as cranky and belligerent as I get when I'm having days when no one realizes that I'm _really not a she._  
>  The book mentioned in the beginning is "I Am Jazz"--it exists, and it's wonderful.  
> I ended up reading [ this article ](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/when-transgender-kids-transition-medical-risks-are-both-known-and-unknown/%22) about hormones and the safe age to start taking them, and it turns out that we just don't know the effects it could have on young kids yet.  
> [Come talk to me on Tumblr](sroloc--elbisivni.tumblr.com)


End file.
